A Paradise Lost to Time

ENLARGE

The Blasket Islands, just off Ireland's Dingle Peninsula, were completely abandoned in 1953.
Corbis

By

Karin Altenberg

February 25, 2012

A remote setting, a handful of young visitors, a collection of colorful locals, an ancient language and a story that spans half a century: These are but a few of the elements that make Robert Kanigel's "On an Irish Island" an exuberant and delightful book.

It might be seen as slightly quixotic to write a 300-page account of a lost way of life. In this fast-moving age, where information is only a click away, where relationships are increasingly electronic and mass consumption is spreading beyond our means, do we even have the time—and the peace of mind—to stop and reflect on what qualities of (traditional) life we have lost to modernity? Largely avoiding the pitfalls of sentimentality, Mr. Kanigel guides us through a world that is now gone forever.

"On an Irish Island" is a richly researched collective biography of the men and women who crossed paths on Great Blasket Island—a small, isolated community off the Dingle Peninsula on Ireland's Atlantic Coast—from around 1905 to the final evacuation of the island in 1953.

During this time, Great Blasket Island was home to around 150 people. Untouched by modern ways, they lived a communal life based on fishing and small-scale farming; there was no electricity, no Catholic priest, no shop of any sort, and the only contact with the outside world was by currach, a wooden-framed canoe that the islanders would row to the mainland to collect mail and supplies.

On an Irish Island

By Robert Kanigel

Knopf, 320 pages, $26.95

In the evenings, the members of the largely illiterate community entertained themselves with music, dancing and storytelling in their own distinct form of West Kerry Irish. It was a free and peaceful life, if harsh and unforgiving. When asked, the islanders did not think they lacked anything in particular. Early 20th-century visitors described them as possessing "dignity and poise" and "heroic grace." By contrast, the socio-political climate on the mainland was anything but calm: The Rising in 1916 was followed by the Irish War of Independence and finally, in August 1923, by the first elections within the Irish Free State.

At the center of Mr. Kanigel's story are five young visitors who arrived on the island in their 20s and early 30s to learn how to speak West Kerry Irish but who became so captivated by the otherworldly spirit of the people and the place—a Tír na nÓg, or "Land of the Young," as many of them called it—that they kept coming back. The best known was J.M. Synge, the author of "The Playboy of the Western World," who first arrived there in 1905. Carl Marstrander, a Norwegian linguist, came in 1907 and soon brought along his student, the Celticist Robin Flower, who would later publish "The Western Island; Or, the Great Blasket" (1944). Later arrivals included Marie-Louise Sjoestedt, a French-Swedish linguist who would later take her life during the Nazi occupation of France, and George Thomson, a Cambridge classicist, Irish scholar and Marxist philosopher with links to Wittgenstein.

Their lives touched those of the natives of Great Blasket Island, among them a few notable writers and raconteurs. Peig Sayers's stories would become compulsory reading in Irish schools, and the Free State would later promote her as the personification of the enduring strength of Irish womanhood. Tómas Ó Criomhthain (Thomas O'Crohan) would publish his distinctive life story, "The Islandman" (1927), as would Muiris Ó Súileabháin (Maurice O'Sullivan) with "Twenty Years A-Growing" (1933). These works, often championed by their young compatriots from the mainland, form what we now call the Blasket Library.

Joining the party in Mr. Kanigel's pages are minor characters like Moya Llewelyn Davies, a mesmerizing Gaelic scholar, spy and gunrunner during the Irish War of Independence; Willie Long, the blustering innkeeper, merchant and schoolmaster of Ballyferriter, County Kerry; and the Daly family of five sons and five daughters, who were the sole inhabitants of one of the smaller islands in the Blasket archipelago. As the author writes about these people, a wonderfully vivid portrait of the island itself emerges.

The Gaelic renaissance was a powerful cultural expression of Irish nationalism during this period, and the growing interest in the Gaelic fringe, the "Gaeltacht," certainly helped to spur the great flowering of writing and literature about Great Blasket. But the shepherds of this literary output—in particular Synge, Flower, Sjoestedt and Thomson—came to the island driven not by political passion but by enthusiasm and curiosity.

It is true that these visitors were, as Mr. Kanigel notes, "privileged people with time to read, write and think" and that they were, to some extent, cultural voyeurs. But reading Mr. Kanigel's narrative, one is struck by their great humanism. They seem to have been remarkably unaffected by the nationalism of the time. Their attitude toward the islanders was not arrogant, superior or opportunistic; rather their keen interest in—and attraction to—the Blasket culture resulted in lifelong and life-changing friendships characterized by mutual love and respect.

From the 1930s, however, largely because of its new literary renown, Great Blasket was suddenly crowded with tourists, journalists, linguists and film crews. This influx, together with the increasing emigration of islanders to America, was to change the island culture forever. During and after World War II, life on the island became almost untenable due to shortages of basic goods. When the remaining islanders, unable to get hold of a doctor from the mainland, had to stand and watch the death of a young man from meningitis, they decided that they had had enough and, in 1953, asked to be evacuated to the mainland. There has been no permanent habitation on the island since.

The Blasket books themselves endure because they reflect a premodern way of life within living memory. As Mr. Kanigel points out, it is for this reason that "the Blaskets speak to us not only of what they once were, but of how we, the rest of us, are today." "On an Irish Island" adds another dimension to the Blasket Library, and it can be read in a variety of ways: as an erudite primer to the works of the islanders; as a beautifully assured ensemble biography; and as a large-scale portrait of a remarkable time in the history of Great Blasket and the wider world. Yet it is, above all, a compelling tale of ordinary—and often enviable—lives in an extraordinary setting.

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